Sustainable UK – what might it look like?

Thing is, there are two, I kind of want to call them ‘attractors’ working here.

Population keeps increasing, oil (and gas etc) supply dwindles as demand increases, there isn’t enough land to use solar/biomass to keep present standard of living.

The other one is that the oil (and gas etc) lasts long enough to totally fuck things up through climate change instead.

We seem to be headed into one or other of those attractors, and it does seem completely inevitable as long as market forces and economic growth continue to take total precendence over any other human considerations whatsoever.

Most of the post-oil solutions that we hear about aren’t too plausible either when you look at them in detail. For example if you work out exactly how much arable land you need for biofuels and compare it to what’s available, and to what’s required for the people we already have to eat food.

There is a sort of steady drip drip in the media of partial solutions that does tend to make it sound like answers are near at hand. This is accompanied by a steady drip drip of PR effort designed to convince us that there isn’t actually a problem. So people don’t know what to think unless they go do the research for themselves.

It’s subject to assumptions. For example, Pimentel (in ‘Food, Energy and Society’) offers the following assumptions for ‘business as usual’

On those assumptions, and assuming soil erosion etc is effectively dealt with using known methods, we get 2 billion sustainable global population with ‘EU-average energy use’. Unfortunately we already have 6 billion and rising, so there are obviously some tricky issues to be figured out here.

What does this mean for the UK?

Given that the policy of the leaders of the US and hence the UK appears to be to continue business as usual, at gunpoint where necessary, albeit with some cosmetic programmes here in the UK, I’d really like to understand what that is likely to mean for all of us.

An increasing weight of evidence has been emerging over the last few years, since the Shell announcements, that the production peak for conventional oil is pretty much imminent. Given rising demand and the failure to implement programmes which could control demand, presumably this means a rising trend in oil prices, and energy prices generally. As far as I’m aware this always causes a recession, and if prolonged, is likely to result in an economic depression of unprecedented dimensions.

The UK is particularly vulnerable, because due to ‘free-market’ policies we’ve been following since Thatcher, we’ve trashed our coal mining infrastructure, burned through most of our oil; we’ve also, since WW2, trashed a whole lot of our arable land and our population has grown to about 6x what it was before the industrial revolution.

It appears to me that any transition to renewable energy is urgent, and best accomplished right now, while we’re still relatively well-off in terms of these resources. While we have it, we should be using it to make the transition. If we wait until we’re in a depression, then the transition becomes much harder.

This is pretty clearly not the likely outcome though. So what are we in for?

I’d be very interested in having a more substantial discussion of the likely implications of this situation for people living in the UK, over the next few decades. Assuming that we carry on with business as usual.

We can do Pimentel’s calculation above for the UK. Here are some very rough numbers.

CIA world factbook says there are (I’ve converted from square miles to ha)

24.4million ha of land in the UK and 6.4 million hectares of it is arable land.

Pimentel says that on the assumptions given in his book, you need per cap:

If we just look at growing food and assuming (as an approximation) you can only do this on arable land, that means that in the absence of oil (as a limiting case) we have a sustainable population of about 12 million, so 1/5 of the numbers we presently have. This is pretty close to the 10m of the census of 1800, before the industrial revolution got started.

We can also be fairly sure that the remaining non-arable land isn’t all usable or available for pasture, biodiversity or energy systems such as bio-fuels. So we can conclude from this that with our present population, whatever the real sustainable figure is, it probably isn’t the 60million we have right now.

We aren’t going to be totally without oil in the forseeable future though, so this is definitely a limiting case, rather than an immediate problem. It does however give you a pretty good feel for how bad things could potentially get.

The gap between these numbers and present day reality is largely plugged by oil and gas, in a variety of different ways. Fuels, fertilisers, pesticides, etc. Those are all going to become much more expensive and much less available, producing economic hardship on a very large scale over the coming decades. Once we’re in a major economic depression, as a result of global oil shortages, something I think is likely within a decade or so, then we’re in a much worse position to make any investments in sustainable alternatives.

With our current political system, only pro-capitalist parties can get elected, so if we’re assuming ‘business as usual’ then we’re assuming this is happening in a capitalist context, with major unemployment due to economic depression.

Assumptions are obviously being made to arrive at Prof. Pimentel’s figures. You can find them articulated in great detail in his book ‘Food, Energy and Society.’ What he’s assuming, roughly, is business as usual, only with sustainable energy and agriculture. So he’s not for example assuming big changes in population distribution. This is quite important. In practice, a fairly large amount of the energy used by the average family is spent in putting food on the table, far more than on running cars or heating their homes for example.

The relatively massive energy use in food production arises because of the process that puts food on the table. Pimentel offers a figure of 10 units of oil energy to put 1 unit of food energy on an average US table. This breaks down as petrochemicals used as fertiliser, drugs for animals and pesticide, transport of fertiliser, drugs for animals and pesticide, harvesting, transport of cereals, vegetables and fruit, transport of animals, transport and disposal of wastes, food processing, packaging, transport to supermarkets etc. See for example what’s in your bag of supermarket salad? for a discussion of just some of these process stages in a bit more detail.

If I eat a tomato grown organically 3m from where I’m sitting right now, then clearly these costs don’t apply. I don’t want to spend my whole life growing food however. So in order to minimise these kinds of costs, but maximise the efficiency of food production and hence radically reduce the energy needs of our way of life, I would suggest that one should cooperate with others to grow food close to where one lives. Eco-villages with a population in the 2-500 range are optimal and experience with these models seems to imply an average of say 8 hrs per cap per week spent growing food.

You can do a fair bit better than Pimentel’s assumed 1.5 ha for food, pasture, biodiversity etc, and also reduce his 1.5 ha for energy. You need about 0.25 ha per cap for this system to produce a complete and balanced diet, but you still need some space for energy systems, to heat your home etc. But around 0.5 ha or somewhere around one acre per human, is enough to provide for a decent way of life.

Assuming that acre is decent arable land, that still only implies a sustainable UK population of around 12m though, while we have 60m citizens at present. If you assume only half of it needs to be arable, you get 24m, but in practice, you mostly don’t get land that’s half arable and half marginal and that matters if were talking about something as localised as an eco-village.

I think that you still need to find some way to recover land that presently isn’t viable, in order to sustain our present population in the absence of oil, but assuming big changes in our way of life.

I think it’s in the realms of the possible, but not with ‘business as usual’ assumptions, or population distribution.

Let’s break down where the oil inputs to agriculture go and analyse them a bit. I suggest we separate two cases.

1) The difference between agricultural efficiency using pesticides etc and by standard organic methods. Typically organic gives about 20% less yield (see e.g. this 21 year study ), but is much more efficient in its use of say nitrogen inputs. Nor does it damage the soil, which petrochemical agriculture does. Given that erosion is also a major food security issue, this is pretty important.

2) All the other stuff. This includes fuels for farm equipment, which is mostly replaceable by work animals given sufficient land for pasture. It’s mostly a matter of fuel for food distribution and packaging and waste disposal though.

The solutions to the latter case would appear to me to be localisation of food production so that you don’t need to use lots of oil for fuel, packaging etc.

So we need to look at the localisation model to see how much extra labour would be required. If a vast amount of extra labour is required, that’s presumably where it comes from, as we can get fairly comparable yields from conventional organic vs chemical farms without the need to greatly increase the labour inputs.

The furthest extreme is everybody just grows their own. Even on that basis, organic smallholders who seek self-sufficiency (rather than those farming commercially) generally seem to manage to produce their food with a fairly reasonable *average* day, although this means pretty heavy labour at some times of year, with relatively light labour the rest of the time. You can get a pretty good feel for what’s involved from Borsodi

It makes more sense to share the labour over a locality though. With an eco-village of 400 people, the figure I’ve seen quoted is 20% of working time spent on growing food, which I believe is based on Swedish eco-village results (I’ll check this)

Now to be sure, the resultant way of life is not at all that promoted by the corporate ‘lifestyle’ industry, but it’s about as comfortable as that of village life circa 1910, plus a few low energy impact forms of modern technology. It’s interestingly, rather similar in some important ways to what Kropotkin describes in ‘Fields, Factories and Workshops’ although he’s coming at it from a rather different direction and isn’t aware of some of the resource issues.

I would argue that if we keep using unsustainable methods to provide food and energy, no matter how cleverly we do it, we just defer the problems. I think that unsustainable energy sources will probably be needed to enable a sane transition to sustainability, given any believeable projections of global population, food and energy supply vs demand etc over the next century.

I don’t think we have any acceptable choice besides making such a transition, but I think that the political influence of capitalists, religious fanatics and other nuisances will make that transition more difficult than it needs to be and may even succeed in making it disastrous for billions of us.

What needs to be done is pretty clear to me though, global population has to be reduced over time (ideally by family planning rather than by the Four Horsemen), unsustainable energy use needs to be phased out, while we still have sufficient of it to boot-strap the transition to sustainable energy use.

Our way of life has to change to make this happen. It won’t be business as usual, but it needn’t be some hellish dystopia either. It depends how we do it. The problem I forsee is that we’ll wait too long to take the necessity seriously and end up trying to make the transition to a lower energy society after the demand for energy has overtaken the supply permanently, with predictably dire economic results. At that point everything gets much harder.

åIf we mess it up badly enough, instead of reducing energy demand through appropriate technology, improving food security through sustainable forms of agriculture and reducing demand for both food and energy by managing global population down over the course of a few generations; we all just pretend that there isn’t any problem until those Four Horsemen arrive to solve these problems for us the hard way. This appears to be the solution favoured by certain factions within those countries most able to do something about it.

3 Comments

I’m wondering how much we need to factor in a margin for the variability of the UK weather. One month/year there is plenty rain but no sun, next month/year there’s plenty sun but no rain, or there’s an absolute deluge followed by a plague of slugs. Experience indicates that there can be unexpected lean years or crop failures for which you have to plan ahead – whereas we now have only a few days’ food in store.

Against a background of escalating ecological crises, and the fact that large parts of the world´s population are being exposed to extreme poverty, inhuman working conditions and increasing social tensions, the annual global military expenditure has risen to more than 1000 billion dollars.
The military-industrial complex of just a few G8 countries is responsible for the overwhelming part of this spending, causing incalcuable social and ecological consequences.

Unequal distribution of global resources, increasingly controlled by large multinational companies, global debt policy and unfair international trading practices ultimately could not be maintained without military security. In many countries the military is used to repress critical opposition.

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 are increasingly used to justify systematic surveillance and the dismantling of constitutional rights. Even European countries have helped to establish Guantanamo-like secret prisons, where torture in all probability takes place.

Iraq was attacked based on falsified evidence causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people, widespread destruction, destabilization and contamination with cancer-causing depleted uranium munitions.
Now plans to attack Iran and the possibility of a new World War have been made public, meeting resistance even from moderate elements within the military due to the unforeseeable consequences.

Faced with the choice between a war, that according to some western leaders, will last for many years or a possible peaceful transformation we support the following demands:

1) [Impeachment proceedings against US President Bush and US Vice President Cheney before the 2008 election, a demand raised in solidarity with large parts of the US public and some members of US Congress.]
Furthermore prosecution by the International Court of Justice of G. W. Bush, R. Cheney and other officials from various countries for waging wars of aggression contrary to international law and committing crimes against humanity.

2) International investigation of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. They are used as the central justification for the “War on Terror”, but well documented evidence shows that the official explanation of 9/11 cannot be correct. International personalities in science, politics, and culture, including high-ranking military veterans, have called for a new investigation.

3) Immediate military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, and no attack against Iran. International prohibition of war as a means of conflict resolution. Military intervention and export of weapons should be criminalized.
In a civilized society torture must be prohibited in any form.

4) Conversion of military industries to civilian purposes and the development of ecological and sustainable energy resources. According to the UN environmental agency, a fraction of the annual global defence expenditure could ensure that all humans have access to clean water and a basic supply of food and healthcare.

This statement is based on a commitment to non-violence and tolerance of all ethnic groups and religions. Two devastating World Wars and historical catastrophes like the Nazi Holocaust must always remind us of the worst consequences of nationalism, racism and incitement to war.

Sign this statement, pass it on, whatever we can do. It is up to us.

(After US-President Obama took office the demand for impeachment in #1 has been placed in parentheses. The text of the declaration remains unchanged.)